Organising multilingually: setting an agenda for studying language at work

Abstract

This paper brings together International Business (IB) and sociolinguistic research on the use of language in multilingual organisations and organising. We problematise core categories and underlying assumptions that have been adopted in this field of research to argue for a holistic and context sensitive approach. Special attention is paid to the notions of national language and multinational organisation. Scholars have started to argue for new ways of researching language in organisations and to call for more processually oriented categories and meanings such as organising and languaging. Current core categories such as monolingual/multilingual, small/large and national/multinational often remain static, structural and binary, and are not aligned with the fluidity and change of human activity or with the promise of the broader linguistic and discursive turns in social sciences. We argue for multidisciplinary enquiry, and propose theoretical and methodological advances with a future agenda for studying the dynamics of language in multilingual settings.